Pee-Wee Herman’s 1988 Christmas Special Proved There’s Nothing Sinister About Offering Youngsters an Alternative to Strait-Laced Normalcy

Tackiness is in the DNA of Christmas, a holiday codified in large part via the cornball sentimentality of the ‘40s and the rosy-cheeked idealism of the ‘50s: embroidered vests, puffy snowsuits, aluminum trees, nativity displays, novelty songs, It’s a Wonderful Life, electric string lights, elves upon shelves. Embracing this with a knowing wink has become part of the holiday fun, with ugly sweater parties now so common they’re barely legible as ironic. A recent trend piece at the New York Times titled “Christmas Kitsch, No Longer Full of Hot Air” analyzes the resurgence of “blow mold” decorations, the hollow plastic figures that lit up the lawn with charming bad taste in the ‘70s. As one enthusiast recalls, “When I was a kid growing up in northwest Indiana, my dad and mom would take my sisters and me and drive around on New Year’s Eve and look at Christmas lights. On one lawn, there was a Santa Claus with nine reindeer, and it looked like they were flying. It was the most magical thing. I remember thinking, When I’m old enough to have a house, I want a Santa and nine flying reindeer.”

A handful of reindeer leap across the snow-blanketed clearing in front of Pee-Wee Herman’s home in the intro to 1988’s The Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special. In the stop-motion sequence created by future The Nightmare Before Christmas animator Joel Fletcher, we see the miniature exterior of the Playhouse decked to the nines in faux frost, candy canes, huge letters spelling J-O-Y, and enough lights to be seen from space; an already chaotic building, seemingly thrown together from walls of different sizes and incongruous colors, is made even more gloriously garish by the Christmas spirit. It’s a fitting welcome to a special that’s truly special, the rare instance of seasonal programming that embraces the chintzy Yuletide aesthetic as a more purposeful camp, steeped in pop-culture history and queer subcultures visible — for those who know to look — just beneath the inviting surface of big-hearted kiddie earnestness. As excitable man-child Pee-Wee, comic genius Paul Reubens was famed for never dropping the bit, and he let everyone in on the joke of Christmas with his over-the-top tinsel-strung fantasia. 

One of the few characters you can hear speak in all caps, Pee-Wee rings in the holiday by screaming “CHRISTMAS!” in his unmistakable nasal squeal as the Marine choir (played gamely by the UCLA men’s choir) belts out a musical number complete with Broadway-worthy choreography. He then approaches the camera, flanked by a pair of diva singers styled to look like the Supremes, and pokes his finger through the fourth wall to ask “My name’s Pee-Wee, what’s yours?” In the space of a few seconds, he unloads signifiers like Santa emptying his bag of presents: the backup belters evoke gay icon Diana Ross, the crisply uniformed choirboys look like they’re right out of a softcore porno, and Pee-Wee’s greeting nods to Bette Midler’s immortal performance in Gypsy. Viewers on the frequency of Reubens and co-mastermind John Paragon will find that each guest arrives bearing subtext as well as the wrapped-up fruitcake ultimately used, in the culmination of an inspired running joke, to construct an all-fruitcake wing of the Playhouse. Naturally, the contractors building it resemble Village People.

To a kid none the wiser, however, the program plays like an intro lesson for appreciating odd obscurities of the past. In part, that was intentional from the start, the presence of former beach-blanket matinee idols Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello as Pee-Wee’s enslaved card-makers paying playful homage to their ‘60s celebrity. But from the vantage of the present, everyone stopping by has something of a non sequitur quality to them, from Spanish cuchi-cuchi guitarist Charo to aged socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor — “Pee-Wee, dahling!” — to the scantily-clad crooning geriatrics of the Del Rubio Triplets. And if the kids can recognize Oprah, they sure don’t remember her as a daytime talk personality with a coiffure hairsprayed to maximum height. (For an added layer of metatextual fun, Pee-Wee condescendingly blows off the woman now best known for the simple fact of being one of Earth’s most powerful people.) That this all played on network television in prime time represents a victory unto itself, Reubens’ improbable popularity bringing the mainstream closer to the esoteric fringe as if lassoing the moon.

This omnivorous curiosity for all things weird and retro also extends to the wild array of artistic formats on display in one of the more stylistically diverse kids’ shows of its day or since, mashing up eras and mediums with the delighted abandon of a Lego imagineering session. With its coterie of talking inanimate objects with names like Clocky and Chairy, the Playhouse itself might as well be a live-action Looney Tune, but there’s a deeper fondness for the variable textures of animation at work as well. Pee-Wee and Magic Johnson enter the Magic Screen, a crude chroma key dimension prowled by a growling hand-drawn yeti. We sample some primo Claymation in a segment featuring coin-eyed girl Penny, and traditional stop-motion for a check-in with the tiny dinosaurs living in Pee-Wee’s wall as they celebrate Hanukkah. The regal King of Cartoons (none other than William Marshall, Blacula in the flesh) passes through to play a burnished copy of 1936’s short “Christmas Comes But Once a Year,” a production of Paramount’s short-lived yet influential Disney competitor Fleischer Studios, in yet another salute to entertainment’s cult favorite also-rans. 

In keeping with Christmas special tradition, the loosest semblance of a plot binds together the series of cameos, culminating in a crisis of conscience for our Pee-Wee. Earlier in the episode, he concocts a wish list so long that it nearly short-circuits beloved robot Conky; in the final scene, Santa himself drops in to tell Pee-Wee that he’ll have to give up all his loot if he wants the children of the world to have theirs. With some prodding, he does the right thing, as he always does. Even if he might be occasionally prone to selfishness or grumpiness or other childish foibles, Pee-Wee’s got a heart of gold, taking his greatest pleasure in making friends and making them laugh. In the same respect that the essence of camp hinges on a genuine affection for unfashionable cultural objects rather than their mockery, so too does this series cultivate a foundation of friendly goodwill underneath the scare quotes. 

Christmas brings about the most felicitous meeting of Reubens’ ethic and interests, his giddy, giggly, come-as-you-are ebullience channeled through a rayon-and-velvet sort of chintzy elegance in season each December. The little miracle contained therein is the way he renders complex concepts — irony, camp, queerness — digestible to an intuitive junior audience, spoken to by a show meeting them on their level while staying on its own off-beat wavelength. The recent hysteria over library-hosted drag story hours suggests a ramp-up in the strain of homophobia that brands any association between gay adults and youth as pedophilia, the very same reactionary current that saw Reubens arrested and made a culture war martyr through the ‘90s and early ‘00s. With his Christmas special, he showed that there’s nothing sinister about the desire to offer youngsters an alternative to strait-laced normalcy. Laughing along with a sense of humor distinct from everything else is the greatest gift of all, even and especially before we’ve got the vocabulary to put that distinction into words. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.